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Haydon waited silently for Roeg to continue. He did not want to distract him from the murky channels of his thoughts. Whatever passages Roeg’s mind was taking, Haydon wanted to follow. He wanted to see all that Roeg would show him of his strangely ordered psyche.
Roeg turned and walked past one of the windows to another section of the wall covered with photographs. He looked at these with as much interest and concentration as if he were seeing them for the first time. He became so absorbed in them that he seemed to have forgotten he was not alone. Haydon waited.
Then, abruptly, Roeg moved away from the wall of photographs. He passed behind one of the sofas, hands still in the pockets of his robe, and walked over to the film projector.
‘‘I’ve studied violence for a long time, Mr. Haydon. I have . . . become a connoisseur. I have . . . an understanding of the principles; I can discriminate and appreciate the subtleties. Like all connoisseurs I surround myself with my obsessions. You know about these.” He took a handout of a pocket and let it rest on the projector. “It is, admittedly, an esoteric collection. It will eventually go to a major university. The definitive archive of violence on film.
“As my understanding of violence increased so did the refinement of my tastes. While I continued to collect every kind of film depicting violence, I began to pursue more rarefied forms of it. War is a general violence, large scale. I was curious about a smaller canvas, a more concentrated record. I literally wanted to move in close. How could I do this? Your business, Mr. Haydon, would have been one way. Homicide. But, of course, that was impossible.”
He smiled and held up two fingers.
“Two recent newspaper articles. The first I would have paid anything to have had on film. An elderly man, a retired accountant despondent over his health, had killed his wife and then, apparently, had tried to commit suicide by slashing his wrists. He was found before he died and his life was saved. The curious thing . . . the fascinating thing about this was that it took this man four hours to murder his wife. He used a sledgehammer and struck her seventeen times. He told the police, ‘I started at 8:00 and finished around noontime.’ He actually said that. Seventeen times in four hours! Remarkable.
“The second article. It was a rather lengthy expression of concern by administrators in the nation’s major universities regarding students’ acts of ‘private brutality,’ ‘personal violence,’ of ‘human meanness’ that they say manifests itself on campuses ‘in mad and infinite varieties.’
Roeg paused a beat to let the point of the two articles create its own emphasis.
“And you ask me what is my fascination with violence. It is only that I openly acknowledge my attraction to it. Freud made us aware of the power of sexuality in our lives and revolutionized the way we live with it. To speak of sexual freedom now is passe; we take it for granted. It permeates our lives to the point of preoccupation, and this new perspective has literally changed the way we live. But who will do the same for violence? It too permeates our lives, and yet we hypocritically pretend to find it abhorrent, though our entertainment and literature and art and politics and society reek with it. We relish it while pretending to reject it. Regarding our attitudes toward violence, we are whited sepulchers.”
Roeg stopped and pensively reached out and put a single finger on the loose reel of the projector, which was loaded with film ready to be threaded. Very deliberately he turned it one revolution, uncoiling a single ribbon of film, which dangled from the reel like a black thread of something evil threatening to unravel in the room. He slowly reversed the revolution and recoiled the film. His eyes, with their own peculiar blackness, studied the white screen at the opposite end of the room as if seeing, in an afterimage visible only to them, the scenes of violence that had danced there for so many hours.
“My ‘fascination,’ Mr. Haydon, is with the Omega of violence. Psychologists readily admit, even if we will not, to the seductive attraction of violence, to its strange and wonderful potency. It is something we crave and to which we will ultimately become addicted. Nothing on earth can equal the sensation and excitement of violence. The energy it generates is like a fabulous heat from another sun, and the human race is attracted to it like the proverbial moth to the flame. We have a deadly fascination with it; we cannot keep away from it. We will go to it again and again, like the moth, until we destroy ourselves in its fire.”
With the flick of his wrist Roeg gave the reel a thrusting reverse spin, and the black polyester film shot off the reel, spewing crazily in glistening coils that jumped and jerked to the floor like disemboweled intestines, the viscera of his obsessions tangling at his feet.
As the reel turned slowly to a halt, Roeg looked at Haydon with a tense expression that was both contemptuous and challenging.
Haydon returned the stare and then said, “By being at the apex of my illustration, Mr. Roeg, you become the central point in everything that has taken place. Everything leads to you. All of the confusion, all of the secrecy, all of the deaths.”
Roeg took his hands out of his pocket and, without moving a step, began rewinding the film by hand. He did this quite naturally, completely relaxed, unhurried.
“Are you accusing me of being in some way responsible for one or all of these deaths you’ve enumerated?” he asked.
“I don’t accuse. I gather evidence, and when I have sufficient evidence I arrest and indict.”
“Then am I being arrested?”
“No. You are being warned.”
“Warned?” Roeg looked up from the reel. “Warned in what respect?”
“The way it appears to me is that Ricky Toy had worked for you long enough to discover that you were involved in questionable activities. He filmed those activities and then proceeded to extort a large sum of money from you, in exchange for not going either public or to the police with what he had found. Someone has now murdered one of Toy’s girlfriends, and I think that Mr. Toy might believe you are somehow responsible for that death. If this is indeed the case, then I also believe that your life might be in danger. I believe Ricky Toy is fully capable of thinking in terms of revenge. This is a warning in that respect.”
Roeg was moving more quickly with his rewinding. He spun the reel with the index finger of his right hand inserted into one of the small holes at the corner of the reel. His left hand guided the film between the disc sides of the reel.
“I have a very good security system, Mr. Haydon, but thank you anyway. I’ll have this information passed on to my men.”
He continued with the rewinding.
“You might also pass on to your men that Toy has a very elaborate backup system for this operation,” Haydon said. “More complex, perhaps, than your men might believe, and certainly too complex to yield to clumsy tactics that will not come close to unraveling it.”
Haydon finally left the spot in front of the wall of photographs, where he had been standing ever since Roeg had begun his long dis course on violence and walked around the projector to confront him. When he spoke, his voice was reasonable, without emotion.
“Tell them, too, that if one more homicide occurs in this case, I will follow its ‘red thread’ all the way to the end of the rope. I am not, Mr. Roeg, in the business of violence as you suggested. I rarely see it because I enter the picture after the fact. My dealings are with the debris of violence. I see the trash in its wake, and it’s ugly. But if I’m lucky, Mr. Roeg, I eventually root out its cause, I find the source, and often that proves to be the ugliest thing of all.”
Roeg did not turn to face Haydon but continued spinning the reel. The hem of his dark burgundy robe reached to the floor and covered the coils of film, which now appeared to Haydon to be whipping up from beneath Roeg’s robe like dancing entrails stripped from his bowels and threaded onto the spool. Like a fourth figure added to the ancient triad of the Fates, his presence formed a modern quaternity. Standing at a spindle of his own devising, he spun from his own viscera a fearful scarlet strand to be added to the string of the Fates, a strand that dealt not with the beginning, length, and end of men’s lives, but with the nature of their deaths.
Haydon did not remember turning and walking out of the room, nor did he remember the long hall or the lurking figure of Harvey Gage, who stood back in the entryway and watched him fumble at the heavy wooden door before he tripped the automatic lock and let Haydon outside into the weighted heat of the summer night. He remembered only stopping at the edge of the paving stones and lighting a cigarette that had somehow gotten into his mouth. He inhaled deeply, aware of his trembling hand and the perspiration that seemed to have jumped from every pore of his body as he stood and looked across the courtyard, trying to calm down.
Roeg’s security men were nowhere in sight. The Vanden Plas was twenty feet away, where the edge of the woods came right up to the paving stones. A lamp pole stood slightly to one side of the car. Haydon took several more draws on his cigarette and then threw it down and started over. He looked up at the lamp. The globe was almost lost in a glittering swarm of night moths seeking the heat within the glass, clamoring in the blue haze of dust that came from the frantic beating of their wings.
No one appeared to help Haydon get into his car, no one stood where the mouth of the drive entered the woods, no one waved to him as he passed through the already opened gates and drove away into the dark.
~
HAYDON HAD NOT KEPT a hand radio with him as he had promised Mooney, and it was a few minutes before he noticed the red light flashing on his beeper, which he had left lying in the console tray between the seats. He checked his watch. He had been at Roeg’s just a little over an hour. It was approaching twelve o’clock.
He pulled up to a service station and used a pay telephone to call the dispatcher.
There were two messages. Ed Mooney was waiting for him at Primo’s. Call or come over. Pete Lapierre wanted him to call the number of another pay telephone. Haydon hung up and called Mooney first.
The cashier at Primo’s laid the telephone down beside the register and called for Mooney. Haydon listened to her chat with the people who were paying, heard the register bell ring, heard her counting out change. Mooney picked up the telephone.
“Nothing happened with me,” he said. “Lam was gone and wasn’t expected back until a little after midnight. Kid there about ten years old. I told him I was a friend of Mr. Hoang’s and that I hadn’t seen him in a long time and wanted to surprise him. Promised him two bucks when I came back if he wouldn’t say anything about me coming by.”
“The boy didn’t say where he had gone?”
“He didn’t know. What about your deal?”
‘‘I’ll tell you when I get over there.”
“Talked to Pete?”
“I’m getting ready to call him now. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
Haydon hung up and called the number Lapierre had left with the dispatcher.
“Pete Lapierre.”
“This is Haydon.”
“Jackpot here, Stuart. We beat Toy to his cache, but don’t get excited. No video tapes. What I found were two false I.D.s. Got a pencil? Two passports and two California driver’s licenses. One in the name of Richard M. Kaun, and one in the name of Richard K. Malik. His photograph’s on all four documents. And twelve hundred dollars in hundreds, fifties, and twenties. I’d say we’ve seriously limited his ability to get around.”
“Excellent. Where are you?”
“I’m across a parking lot here at an all-night pharmacy. I can see the security company from where I’m standing, and I’ve got a backup unit hidden around the corner.”
“You’d better get those names to somebody back at the office so they can start checking flights, car rentals, everything. And in the morning the banks will have to be checked for all three names. Bob was going to give us some help on that.”
“I’ve already called it in. You want me to stay with this?”
“Yes. There’s a chance Toy will try to pick those things up. He’s going to be hurt if he doesn’t.”
“How did it go at your end?”
Haydon explained to him what had happened. “I’m going to meet Ed now and then try to track down Hoang. Let us know if something comes up.”
He was only twenty blocks from Primo’s, a little Tex-Mex restaurant not far from downtown between Rosalie and Smith that made possibly the best chicken enchiladas and guacamole in the city. Mooney was well into a serving of each of these when Haydon found him at a small corner table. Haydon ordered a guacamole for himself and a cup of coffee. He massaged his eyes, which were beginning to sting, and brought Mooney up to date.
“The interview was long overdue,” he said, finishing the rundown and mixing a lot of cream with his coffee. “I wish I had talked to him earlier. It may have triggered something.”
“This is a weird story, Stuart,” Mooney said. He had finished his food and was nibbling tostadas. Haydon thought his sunburn looked worse. “Something better break on it. Does Roeg think we know more than we do?”
“I think so. I hope so.”
“Does that give us an advantage?”
“I’m hoping he will step up his search for Toy. He’s going to make a mistake, maybe give us an opening.”
“You think so?”
“Somebody will.”
“I want a look at that video. You think it’s going to blow Roeg out of the water? You think it’s big stuff?”
Haydon nodded. He gulped down the coffee and motioned to the waiter for a refill. He took it like medicine, needing the caffeine to pick up his flagging energy.
“Where does Hoang live?” he asked. “Allen Parkway.”
Haydon started on his guacamole, dipping the salad with the chips from the fresh basket of tostadas. When he finished they asked for more coffee and Haydon smoked two more cigarettes. Killing time. When it was almost one o’clock they left.